Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

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michael mills
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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#16

Post by michael mills » 02 Dec 2011, 01:49

As with any foreign or specialising correspondent - his area of assigmment becomes his "area of expertise"; hence, when posted to Northern Ireland fo three years early in the Troubles, his work and time there led to the above and
The Point of No Return: The Strike which Broke the British in Ulster (1975). London: Times Books/Deutsch. ISBN 0-233-96682-X
Well, I do not think he was assigned to Ukraine in 1942, so he has no expertise in what happened there at that time. As I wrote, that may be why he so carelessly distorts Struk's statements, such as that Vieweg had been a member of a hit squad shooting Jews on the Eastern Front whereas in fact that person had been posted to Norway.
It may not look like an organised shooting but the text at the backside of the photo says it is "Judenaktion", which does not suggest ad hoc-operation. Which part of that action it is, remains of course an open question as we do not at the moment have any descriptions about the events. According to Struk, another photo apparently showing the same operation includes soldiers posing for the photographer.
As I wrote, I found a large number of sites exhibiting this photo, and the standard description is that it shows Jews being shot adter digging their own grave.

There is in existence a number of photographs (and even a film) of victims being shot in or beside a prepared pit. The procedure is always the same; the victims stand in the pit, or stand or kneel in a straight line along the edge of the pit, the shooters stand in a line behind them and fire.

The reason for the sameness of the procedure is obvious; the victims after being shot fall down in or into the pit and can be simply covered over with earth, thereby avoiding the onerous and unpleasant task of actually carrying the corpses of the victims to the pit.

In another variant, the so-called "sardine-packing", the victims were made to actually lie down in the pit where they were then shot, sometimes by just one shooter walking along the line of victims, on the edge of the pit or even in it, shooting them one by one.

The photo in question shows nothing like that. The victims are not standing in or along an excavated pit, but are divided into at least two groups.

There is a person lying at the feet of the man in German police uniform who appears to be firing at the woman with the child. That person may have been shot already; it is possible that the policeman had shot her from behind, and then turned to shoot the woman with the child, who may be running away.

On the other hand it is possible that the person lying on the ground has not been shot, and is simply lying there.

If we assume that this person has in fact already been shot, presumably by the policeman shown aiming his rifle, we are left with the question why he or she was shot in that position, and not stood in or at the edge of a grave. As it is, the shooters are left with the task of dragging a corpse to the grave, which in keeping with the normal procedure is something they would have tried to avoid.

As I wrote, the general picture is one of disorganisation, even chaos, not of an organised shooting.

It may be that the persons in civilian clothes were indeed being conveyed to an execution site, but it is doubtful that the photo shows that prepared site. It is more probable that for some reason (quite possibly the realisation or suspicion that they were being led to their deaths) the persons in civilian clothes began to scatter and the policemen guarding them then just started firing at then in situ, which would explain why the victims are not neatly lined up along a pit, as shown in other photographs of executions or as described by witnesses.

The bottom line is that we have to interpret the action shown in the photo from what we actually see there, not try to fit it into a pre-conceived formula that we know from elsewhere.

Fisk poses the right question when at the beginning of his gushy opinion piece he asks what we are seeing here. Unfortunately, he does not really try to analyse dispassionately what is shown in the photo but merely waxes all emotional about a presumed woman with a parting in her hair (as he tends to do, quite deliberately, in all his journalistic writings); that may be due to his lack of expertise in this area. But as I wrote previously, his obvious purpose is to draw a parallel between alleged German atrocities in Ukraine in 1942 and alleged American atrocities in Iraq in the period since 2003.

As for the other photo referred to by Struk, it is merely a surmise on her part that it shows the same scene at a later stage. In order to make any judgement about that second photo, we would need to know more about its history, eg where was it found, when, etc.

For what it is worth, I will offer an alternative interpetation of what the photo shows. A group of German policemen (at least five of them, the man shown in the photo, three men with rifles not shown, and the person who took the photo) are guarding a group of civilians (at least seven of them).

Two shovels are lying on the ground, and it is reasonable to presume that they had been carried by the civilians, and that those civilians had been given the task of doing some digging. There appears to be some disturbed earth on the extreme right edge of the photo, next to the group of (possibly) five civilians bending over or crouching down, so it may be that the digging task had already commenced.

Since the shovels are lying on the ground, it could be that the guards have ordered the civilians to take a break; in any case they are not actually digging. But the civilians are definitely at ground level, bending over or crouching down, not standing in any sort of excavated pit.

In this proposed scenario, the policemen guarding the prisoners have ordered them to take a break and to lie down, the latter for the purpose of keeping them under guard. The group of four or five civilians to the right of the photo have laid down the shovels and are in the process od assuming a prone position, as ordered.

The one policeman shown in the photo has been guarding two women, one of them holding a child. The two women were standing separately from the other four (or five) civilians; perhaps they were not doing any digging. The policeman was standing behind them.

One of the two women has obeyed the order to lie down on the ground. Being nervous and afraid, she presses her face against the ground to show her obedience.

The other woman panics and starts to run away. The policeman who had been standing behind her raises his rifle and takes aim at her. Possibly he had ordered her stop and lie down. Possibly the other policemen standing to the left, outside the photo, saw the woman start to run away and also aimed their rifles toward her.

What happened next we do not know. Perhaps the woman stopped and lay down. Perhaps she was shot.

But how did this dramatic scene come to be photographed. We have to assume that someone in the party of guards had brought his camera and decided to take a photo. Possibly the guards were relaxing after ordering the civilians to take a break, and one of them decided to take a snapshot of the civilians lying on the ground and the other policemen standing in a relaxed position guarding them.

It may be that the photographer had taken a shot of the civilians digging ("lazy Jews put to useful work"), and was preparing to take another shot of them lying down. The fact that the other policemen are outside the frame of the photo suggests that originally the photographer was not aiming at them, but rather at the huddled group of civilians at the right of the photo.

Under this scenario, the photographer is aiming his camera toward the group of civilians who have been digging; he is waiting for them to lie down before taking his photo. His police comrades are not in the shot being prepared; they are standing to the left, and so are the two women.

As the photographer is lining up his camera, he hears a sudden shout. He swings sightly to the left, still holding his camera in the ready position. He sees the woman with the child running to the right, away from the policeman guarding her; he sees that policeman aiming his rifle at her. Immediately, on impulse, he takes the photo.

The result is an unusually dramatic scene that does not give the impression of having been staged. The very drama of the scene, its uniqueness, may be the reason for the photo's having been sent by mail to Germany.

As for the word "Judenaktion" allegedly written on the back of the photo (and there is no way of knowing for certain whether the words on the back of the photo had been written by the sender, or by the Poles who found it), it is entirely possible that the group of civilians consisted of Jews who were in the process of being taken to an execution site. If that is the case, it is unlikely that the place where the photo was taken was that actual execution site, it is more likely that the photo has adventitiously captured an impromptu escape attempt.

On the other hand, maybe the civilians were not being taken to be executed. Perhaps they were being taken somewhere to do some work, and one or more of them tried to escape. Perhaps the civilians were not even Jews. We do not know for certain. The only indication that they may be Jews is the word "Judenaktion" on the back of the photo, and we do not know for certain who wrote those words.

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phylo_roadking
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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#17

Post by phylo_roadking » 02 Dec 2011, 02:36

Well, I do not think he was assigned to Ukraine in 1942, so he has no expertise in what happened there at that time
Nor was he in Dublin from 1939 to 1945 - but In Time Of War is as I've noted widely regarded as THE work on Ireland and it's relations with the UK during the "Emergency". Nor was Cornelius Ryan at Arnhem or Normandy, nor Laurence Thompson in the House of Commons in 1940 etc., etc.....
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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#18

Post by siwiec » 02 Dec 2011, 03:10

michael mills wrote: As for the other photo referred to by Struk, it is merely a surmise on her part that it shows the same scene at a later stage. In order to make any judgement about that second photo, we would need to know more about its history, eg where was it found, when, etc.
As she mentions that it too has text with same handwriting, location seems to be the same, and apparently shooter in the first photo appears also in the second one, it is relatively well grounded conclusion. Apparently the source of the photo is the same as in the first one.
michael mills wrote: As for the word "Judenaktion" allegedly written on the back of the photo (and there is no way of knowing for certain whether the words on the back of the photo had been written by the sender, or by the Poles who found it),
Well, what in this world can we know for certainty. Any reasons to assume text is forgery besides it not fitting your interpretation?

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#19

Post by michael mills » 03 Dec 2011, 03:10

Any reasons to assume text is forgery besides it not fitting your interpretation?
Siwiec,

The word "forgery" is yours, not mine.

It implies falsification, an intent to deceive, none of which I claimed. I get very annoyed when someone tries to distort the meaning of something I wrote.

The words written on the back of the photo in question have the intent of describing the scene shown in it. The question is whether those words were written by someone who actually witnessed that scene and knew from personal experience what was happening, or whether they were written by someone who only saw the photograph and wrote down what he thought was happening.
As she mentions that it too has text with same handwriting, location seems to be the same, and apparently shooter in the first photo appears also in the second one, it is relatively well grounded conclusion. Apparently the source of the photo is the same as in the first one.
This is what Struk actually writes:
Printed directly underneath this controversial picture there was a second image. It showed five armed men - four in uniform and one dressed as a civilian - standing looking towards the camera behind a number of bodies on the ground. We assume them to be dead. The flat barren landscape is identical to that featured in the first photograph. One of the uniformed men, with a weapon slung around his neck, looks remarkably like then man pointing the gun at the woman and child. On the back of the photograph, in the same handwriting as the first, is written: "Ukraine 1942". As far as I am aware this is the only occasion that this image has been printed alongside the image of the soldier pointing his weapon. The image of the dead does not have the same dramatic impact as the image of the woman with the child, whom we imagine is about to be shot.
She is referring to an article of 25 February in the Polish illustrated colour weekly magazine "Swiat", in which both photos were published, together with three others (presumably not of the same scene).

Struk's words leave a lot of questions unanswered.

Did she see the original of this second photo? Or did she see only the published version in "Swiat"? Or has she not seen it at all, just relying on a description of it?

Has she actually seen the words written on the back of the second photograph? Is she competent to make an unassailable comparison of handwriting?

She does not say anything about where this second photo was found, or where it is now. Is it in the possession of Jerzy Tomaszewski like the first one? Nothing in her text indicates that it was, or that the two photos were found together.

She does not say whether the bodies shown in the second photo bear any resemblance to the civilians shown in the first photo.

As for her claim that one of the men in uniform shown in the second photo resembles the man pointing his rifle at the woman in the fiorst photo, anyone looking at that first photo must conclude that the features of that man with the rifle are very indistinct and partly in shade, such that it would be very difficult to compare them with those of a man shown in any different photograph.

Perhaps the resemblance seen by Struk lies simply in the fact that the man in the second photo is shown wearing the same uniform as the man with the rifle in the first photo. But that is the very nature of uniforms; they are intended to look the same.

All in all, the vague details given by Struk in relation to the second photo do not enable us to draw any firm conclusion at all about what is being shown in the first photo. The fact that Mazur and Tomasezewski published the two photos in immediate proximity to each other indicates that they intended to manipulate the viewer into the impression that the photos represented two different views of the same occurrence.

It is very disappointing that Struk has not seen fit to publish that second photo in her book; that would have enabled us to draw our own conclusions. Perhaps that indicates that she does not have access to that second photo, and perhaps has not even examined the original.

I have never seen this mysterious second photo, and I wonder if any other member of this Forum has, and if so, where it can be found.

I personally am not prepared to accept what Struk says about the second photo until I have seen it for myself.

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#20

Post by siwiec » 03 Dec 2011, 12:55

michael mills wrote: Siwiec,

The word "forgery" is yours, not mine.

It implies falsification, an intent to deceive, none of which I claimed. I get very annoyed when someone tries to distort the meaning of something I wrote.

The words written on the back of the photo in question have the intent of describing the scene shown in it. The question is whether those words were written by someone who actually witnessed that scene and knew from personal experience what was happening, or whether they were written by someone who only saw the photograph and wrote down what he thought was happening.

I'm sorry if I interpreted somewhat inaccurately your message. But you implicated words may have written by the Poles who found it, who on the other hand said that text was already there when they found the photo. Text is written in German so it is not just a description made by the Poles. So as far as I can see, what you suggest is that they lied about the text, decieved intentionally.

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#21

Post by pugsville » 05 Dec 2011, 07:06

It's not Fisk's area of expertise as far as I know, being familiar with his writing on the middle east where I find him pretty even handed (while he's been pretty critical of Israel at times, he's written critical pieces of all regimes in the region). He's NOT an historian, he's a journalist there is a subtle difference.

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#22

Post by little grey rabbit » 05 Dec 2011, 07:11

siwiec wrote:
little grey rabbit wrote:2. Is there any actual reports or sources (presumably in German) of the two identifications Mr Fisk claims took place? Firstly of a former Einsatzgruppen member who recognised the rifle and the uniform. Then the gentleman in Dresden who recognised himself?
Sources are in Struk's book. Soldier recognising the rifle and the uniform was Kurt Vieweg, who sent a letter to Der Spiegel in 1965 about the photo.
As I understand it, Struk only mentions the account of Kurt Vieweg - is that correct? Which leaves open the question if someone in Dresden ever ran out of a gallery crying that's me, that's me - as Fisk claims.

Jerzy Tomaszewski - according to Struk - worked for an outfit known as the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the underground government.
When the uprising began, on August 1, 1944, Tomaszewski was one of some two dozen photographers assigned by the Bureau of Information and Propaganda (BIP) to document the battle. Tomaszewski remembers the main principles of his job: always be on the frontline; process the film as soon as possible; and protect the negatives at all costs. The underground commandeered a number of photo labs, including one called Foto-Greger where a photographer named Waclawa printed Tomaszewski's photographs. Each print, captioned and dated, was dispatched to the daily newspapers and bulletins.
But if I understand Struk's reconstruction correctly, this particular photo exists only in Tomaszewski's archive (and was not sent to London) and first appeared in the public sphere in 1959/1960. I am not sure when the story about the anonymous postal worker who found it first appeared. It would be interesting to read the letter "Dear Oma, Here are some pictures of my time on the Eastern Front. Enjoy. Love Kurt"

From her earlier book, Photographing the Holocaust, pp163-164
In Poland in 1959 the first edition of 1939-1945, We Have Not Forgotten was published in English, Russian and French. Two further editions in English, Spanish, Portuguese and German followed in 1960 and 1961. All three editions consisted principally of Nazi atrocity photographs - among them, public hangings, the executions at Bochnia and mass executions, including at Mizocz and Liepaja, those taken at the ramp at Birkenau, the photographs taken by the Sonderkommado at Birkenau, photographs from the Stroop Report of the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which served as a reminder of what Nazism had meant during the war and of 'Poland's martyrology under Nazi occupation'. The Introduction to the 1960 edition stated that 'in light of recent events', Nazism had taken on a 'special meaning.' The authors saw it as necessary to remind the world about the 'Nazi barbarity in Poland' and 'to warn the young generation against the recurrence of genocide'. Its message was unambiguous: 'A wave of anti-Semitism is spreading in various directions and young people in schools are presented with a false picture of the past that is insulting to the memory of the victims of fascism.' In an attempt to 'disseminate the truth' about the Third Reich a detailed account of the extermination of Jews in the death camps of Poland was also included.[/quote
Jerzy Tomaszewski was one of the three authors of that book - which seemed very much attuned to official Polish attitudes and Cold War politics in Poland and the two Germanys of the period.

From page 81 of the recent book we get the clear indication that the picture was not sent abroad during WW2
After Herbert's execution Tomaszewski and Kucharski went into hiding until they received orders to organise a secret laboratory in Warsaw. It was in this laboratory in Chielna Street in early 1943 that Tomaszewski first saw the photograph taken in Ivangorod. Although the laboratory workers were instructed to destroy material after it had been microfilmed, Tomaszewski often kept and hit pictures and documents in locations in and around the city, sometimes with help form his mum. She was known to stash photographs behind the altar of a church near the family home or to take them to the homes of relative in the suburbs. In this way some of these images survived the war.
page 85 has some more about the publication in 1959
In 1959, more than a decade after the war had ended, Jerzy Tomaszewski was one of three editors commissioned by the Polish Foreign Office to compile book entitled 1939-1945: We Have Not Forgotten. Officially its publication commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the German army in September 1939, but there was a more pressing reason: as a response to what the communist-led government saw as the rearmament of West Germany and the rise of neo-Nazism in Western Europe.
....The majority [of the photos] had been taken from Glowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce (Main Commission for the Research inot German crimes in Poland), the national archive formed in 1949 for the purpose of collecting evidence of Nazi crimes. But the cover featured the photograph from Tomaszewski's archive [sic] that showed the German soldier pointing a gun at a woman and child at Ivangorod. It was severaly cropped so that only the soldier and the woman and child were visible, but it was the first time it had been published.
This was a collection filled mostly with staples of the Holocaust canon - Birkenau, Stroop etc, with the addition of a single[?] photo from the "Tomaszewski archive"

page 86 suggests the "Tomaszewski archive" was able to produce another picture from Ivangorod
As a response to the article in DSZ on 25 February 1962, Jerzy Tomaszewski and fellow editor Tadeusz Mazur published an article in the Polish illustrated colour weekly magazine Swiat. It said that the readership of DSZ were 'old believers in the Third Reich' and accused them of 'a pricelss "revisionist" campaign'. To support their claim they published five photographs as evidence of the atrocities that had been committed in Poland and in the Soviet Union by German soldiers, including the one taken at Ivangorod. Printed directly underneath this controversial picture there was a second image. It showed five armed men - four in uniform and one dressed as a civilian - standing looking towards the camera behind a number of of bodies on the ground. We assume them to be dead. The flat barren landsacpe is identical to that featured in the first photograph. One of the uniformed men, with a weapon slung around his neck, looks remarkably like the man pointing the gun at the woman and the child. On the back of the photograph, in the same handwriting as the first, is written: 'Ukraine 1942'. As far as I am aware this is the only occasion that this image has been printed alongside the image of the soldier pointing his weapon. The image of the dead does not have the same dramatic impact as the image of the woman with the child, whom we imagine is about to be shot.
BTW Otto Croy's dispute with the photograph seems mostly to have revolved around light and the way shadows fell rather than uniforms.

Certainly the woman looks like she is floating or jumping

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#23

Post by little grey rabbit » 05 Dec 2011, 07:27

siwiec wrote:
michael mills wrote:There remains the question of the old man who, so Fisk claims, looked at the photo at an exhibition in Dresden and recognised himself as the shooter. Does that particular episode feature in Struk's book?

That alleged person presumably is different from the Vieweg who wrote to Spiegel in 1965, identifying the uniform and rifle of the shooter as genuinely German.
It was mentioned passingly, his identity is not known. And Struk does not claim that he was looking at Iwangorod photo, even though from Fisk's column one might get such an idea.
It is impossible from what Struk says on page 85 to know what photo he was looking at or if the Ivangorod photo even appeared in that exhibition.

Where as far from Fisk's column giving you that idea, it is explicitly and incorrectly stated.

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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#24

Post by phylo_roadking » 05 Dec 2011, 21:05

He's NOT an historian, he's a journalist there is a subtle difference
When someone is paid to report news or opinion, he/she is a journalist;

When someone writes history, he/she's a historian; as per Wordnet.princeton.edu., "a historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it"...

Though as Wiki says - "although "historian" can be used to describe amateur and professional historians alike, it is reserved more recently for those who have acquired graduate degrees in the discipline."

In other words - there are TWO definitions of "historian" - and Fisk certainly fits the former.

By the latter definition - I'M a "historian"! :lol:
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Re: Robert Fisk Colum on a famous photo

#25

Post by little grey rabbit » 06 Dec 2011, 06:47

In the English version of the "Crimes of the Wehrmacht" catalogue there is an afterword by Jan Philipp Reemtsma "On the reception of the Exhibition in Germany and Austria" - which might be the original source of "recognising himself" story.

page 211-212
The authenticity of the photos has been called into question. They were said to be forgeries from archives in the Soviet Union. In no case was a charge of forgery made plausible, to say nothing of actual proof. there were long discussions of whether a given photo was correctly attributed to site A or whether it might not have been taken in the vicinity of B (The fact is that it is no longer possible to establish the identity of specific photos with one hundred percent certainty when some have lain in wallets taken from prisoners of war for half a century. The fact is that certain photos can be found in more than one archive bearing different captions.) One photo [page 44, photo 3 - a Wehrmacht soldier during the shooting of Serbian civilians in Pancevo] became the subject of polemic attacks, because it appeared especially often in reports on the exhibition. The claims made were that the photo was a forgery, that the shooting depicted had been carried out by the Waffen SS and not by the Wehrmacht, that regulation trial had proceded the execution, or that far fwere than 36 people had been executed. The debate went on until a witness attested to the authenticity of the photo. He had been present and was an especially credible witness because he still felt the execution had been justified -those shot were partisans and their execution was, in his opinion, legally correct
\

I was not aware that anyone claimed the Pancevo photo was a forgery. Looking at the printed version it looks high quality to me - although a lot less than 36 executed are in frame (rather 10).

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